That is indeed an awesome find. It was pretty clear that 'Crackers' was real - and not even a 'proof of concept' as some people still call it - far too much work had gone into it for that. For whatever reason it got canned - maybe to move it to 32X, or maybe it was ressurected later, we don't know. We don't even know if Chaotix was done by the same team, or they just picked up where a previous team left off. Maybe we'll find out some day. I'm still not convinced that that title screen wasn't slapped on by somebody else, though. The fact it doesn't run on a real console without crashing (and yet the game part does) points towards that, too. This does, though, seem to confirm that the name is correct, where previously I thought the same as a few people here. Unless, of course, the person responsible for slapping that screen on there also worked on chaotix, and thought he'd hide that message in there for us all to find later ;-) Unlikely but still :D I believe you've hit the nail squarely on the head there, my friend
Is there ever going to be a way to play this version fully without it crashing constantly? Being the earliest it'd be interesting to actually play the whole thing through.
Has anyone figured out exactly where, in the code, it crashes? I've not played it enough to tell, all I know is that you have to abort the SEGA screen to get it to run. IIRC the title screen still appears so maybe it's something in the code for the SEGA screen? Something that didn't break on their dev systems (with their ICEs and everything)?
<!--quoteo(post=181855:date=Feb 27 2008, 02:43 PM:name=Cinossu ???)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Cinossu ??? @ Feb 27 2008, 02:43 PM) har[/quote] ?? ???? (v5b) to jump, to fly, to leap, to spring, to bound, to hop, (P) ?? ???? (v5b) to jump, to fly, to leap, to spring, to bound, to hop, (P) Wonder what relation that has to a skull.
While I can't confirm why does it exactly crash, keep in mind that it was clearly a "pre-alpha" or whatever you want to call it, that's it, it could have been designed only with the dev hardware in mind at that point. What I CAN confirm is that the title screen is NOT a hack nor something or that sort. There's a dissasembly out there if you want to look by yourself, but that fact is clear for me.
To me the "Sonic Crackers" story goes like this: In a Sega/Sonic Team meeting, somebody (probably Hiroshi Fukutsu) describes this idea of a new gameplay system, where the player is connected by a string to another character and has to cooperate to get to the goal. The big guys consider the idea and ask for a demonstration. A small group of programmers/artists creates the Sonic Crackers proof-of-concept/prototype/alpha/demo/whatever to show the concept. The big guys at Sega accept the idea, but the big one in Sonic team says: "that's not much like sonic" and disagrees with the idea. The group ends up having to pick up the not-so-known characters of the sonic story and develop the game that ends up as "Knuckles' Chaotix".
<!--quoteo(post=182223:date=Feb 29 2008, 08:05 AM:name=Borisz)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Borisz @ Feb 29 2008, 08:05 AM) har[/quote]?? ???? (v5b) to jump, to fly, to leap, to spring, to bound, to hop, (P) ?? ???? (v5b) to jump, to fly, to leap, to spring, to bound, to hop, (P) Wonder what relation that has to a skull.[/quote]Could be the debug icon for an invisible "kill" object, just like the four ?'s in Sonic 2 (when Sonic touches them, he'd "leap" and spill his rings). Yeah, who knows. =P EDIT: By the way, wasn't Sonic's palette present in the final version, being loaded before all the others? I have the feeling that, if we overwrite Mighty's in this ROM, all these objects will show their correct colors.
That would make sense... You'd have to jump/fly/leap/whatever over this object or else you'd die, which would draw credibility towards the invisible "kill" object. That's a pretty odd graphic to use for it, though. EDIT: Oh, wait! What if it's one of those signs of an upcoming death pit or something?
<!--quoteo(post=182061:date=Feb 28 2008, 12:13 PM:name=xdaniel)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (xdaniel @ Feb 28 2008, 12:13 PM) "SONIC CRACKERS S32X" - Start the ROM in Kega Fusion - Select TIME ATTACK in main menu - Advance through PLAYER and NPC SELECT - On ATRACTION SELECT, do a Save State - Now, start the ROM in Gens and load the Save State - The game will most likely screw up and crash, but that doesn't matter - Enter the Genesis VDP viewer via CPU->Debug->Genesis VDP (- If you can't see anything, select a different palette - * on the numpad, I think)[/quote] Pure German Quality, excellent find!
No version of Chaotix from what I have seen has either a MCZ-style spike pit or a routine to kill off the characters when they fall off the level. They just fall off, like in Crackers, if you do that -- even though the bottom of the level is completely covered in solid tiles.
http://s85.photobucket.com/albums/k61/ulti...drunkcharmy.gif Drunk Charmy? I might have missed a frame out by accident, but it looks similar to that of Knuckles'.
Well... Every character is supposed to have a "dazed" animation since Sonic Crackers. That's possibly how they were supposed to die, since there are no actual "dying" frames as in the other games. There's some small stars before the bubble sprite that could have gone along with these animations, by the way.
Indeed!! Has anyone notified The Associated Press about this earth-shattering discovery??? It's been well known for a while that Chaotix started out as "Sonic Crackers", and that "Sonic Crackers" was one of the changes in gameplay they were thinking of making (another was isometric view) for a Sonic game a time before Chaotix game out. You'd think you nerds and geeks would already know this.
but still, it's not a rumor anymore. we have a writing that is telling us that thing is sonic crackers, and it's from sega itself. So yeah, it's confirmed. Now to the "why the hell didn't they put sonic on it" talk, especially considered it could have raised 32X sales a lot.
Think about this, though: why did the Chaotix team try to reinvent the Sonic engine from scratch? You'd expect them to use the engine from a previous Sonic game, just like the main series did by subsequentially building on top of their previous work, wouldn't you? It's like "Sonic Team" (I use this term loosely to name the team that was behind the original Sonic trilogy, not specifically the Sonic Team from 1991 or 1996-onwards) denied the team access to the game's engine, or something. Which is pretty plausible, considering how conservative they were towards their mascot back then. Similarily, couldn't they have denied use of Sonic and Tails, explicitely? For reasons unknown, to be sure, I mean, they did outsource the blue hedgehog to such marvelous titles as Sonic Spinball and Tails and the Music Maker, but it's still possible that it happened. What I'm thinking here is that the Chaotix studio presented the Sonic Team a proof-of-concept, to which Sonic Team refused to give the green light for whatever reason. Perhaps they thought the title would give the Sonic brand a bad name (if so, the point was moot, since Sonic ended up jumping the shark with S3&K), so they were forced to use resources from elsewhere. They essentially reinvented the wheel by making a shoddy remake of the Sonic engine, deleted Tails, cleverly rewrote Sonic into long forgotten Mighty and made a entire cast of characters to make it worth playing. This theory doesn't explain how the hell they got the rights to Knuckles, or more importantly, Eggman, though.
I guess Naka just didn't want his code in other people's hands... just like happened with the NiGHTS engine and Sonic X-Treme.
Exactly, that was the point I was attempting to convey. If he denied access to the games' source code, couldn't he plausibly also deny them the Sonic character? Come to think of it, if Sonic HAD to be removed for some reason or other, keeping Tails in there just wouldn't fit, now would it. Maybe one thing led to another.
